IN a remarkable achievement, the US’s oldest serving astronaut, Dr. Michael Pettit, has returned to Earth on his 70th birthday after completing a 220-day mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Pettit, alongside his Russian crewmates, Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, landed safely in the Kazakh steppe on Sunday morning, aboard the Soyuz MS-26 space capsule.
The crew’s return marked the end of a mission that saw them orbit Earth 3,520 times. Pettit’s mission was his fourth, bringing his total days spent in space to 590.
Though he holds the record as the oldest active astronaut, Pettit is not the oldest person to fly in space. That record belongs to John Glenn, who flew at 77 in 1998.
After their return, the astronauts will undergo a period of readjustment to Earth’s gravity.
Pettit, born in Oregon on April 20, 1955, will return to Texas, while his Russian colleagues will return to Russia’s Zvyozdniy Gorodok space training base.
The return follows a similar mission in March, when two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, returned after a technical delay extended their stay on the ISS for over nine months.
